Triumph of His Will

Only Quentin Tarantino could create ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ wherein Brad Pitt plays a redneck leading a band of tough Jews bent on going, well, medieval on Nazis. And that’s just one part of his new movie. Alex Pappademas follows the most ambitious director of his generation from Berlin to Cannes to Los Angeles as he struggles to finish what he hopes will be his new masterpiece

quentin tarantino is at the hamburger hamlet on Sunset Boulevard. Back-corner booth, in the shadows of the Tap Room. His wallet's on the table. You know it's his wallet because it says bad motherfucker on it. (Seriously. It does.) He's wearing a half-zipped Nike warm-up jacket, no shirt. He's talking to Lay Lay.

A minute ago, Lay Lay came up to our booth and asked if she could buy Quentin a drink, "for all the years of wonderfulness." Lay Lay's got nice arms. Lay Lay's gushy/apologetic under a fringe of blond bangs. Quentin was chewing the second slider from a plate of four when she walked up, so he held his napkin over his face like a silent-movie bank robber. Quentin said, "Sure!"

Now she's back, proffering a fresh mint julep with a shot of hassle on the side: "Will you please get back to work for me?" she asks. "I'm missing you." Tarantino's expression doesn't change, but you can tell there's a mint leaf of annoyance garnishing his response: "August," he says. "My new movie comes out in August." (It's called Inglourious Basterds, and Brad Pitt's in it, kicking ass and collecting Nazi scalps, and it's only the movie Tarantino's been talking about making for, like, a hundred years, Lay Lay!)

He laughs so she knows it's okay. Lay Lay remembers now, about the new movie. She says listen—her band is playing down the street at the Roxy tonight. "It's three of us ladies," she says. "I play drums." Hence the arms. "So if you're looking for fun," she says, "come see us!" Quentin thanks her for the invite. He thanks her for the drink.

I've been warned that he's tired. He spent six hours at a photo shoot today. And he's still in shock over David Carradine, found dead in a Bangkok hotel yesterday morning. Last night, Quentin went on Larry King Live, looking like a traumatized superfan. He showed Larry his Kung Fu lunchbox, complete with thermos.

Then there's the movie. Basterds screened at Cannes in May. Variety said it was "never less than enjoyable." The Hollywood Reporter found it lacking in "those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque." The Guardian called it "an armor-plated turkey." This in turn has fed rumors that the Weinstein Company is nervous about the movie's two-and-a-half-hour running time, about the long stretches of dialogue in subtitled French and German. A few days after we meet in L.A., a few Hollywood gossip sites float the rumor that Quentin has been asked to cut forty minutes out of the movie.

Tarantino says he's not worried about the way Basterds was received at Cannes. The "bona fide literary film critics"—the ones he respects, as opposed to Internet mole people and "celebrity journalists"—mostly dug the movie. And when the studio screened it this week in L.A., it went over huge. If not for Carradine's death, he says, "I'd be happy as a fucking clam."

He seems less happy than a clam tonight, though. He seems tense. He's sweating despite the air-conditioning. Banging those tasty beverages. There's a defensive edge to his trademark know-it-all answers.

"I respect criticism," he says. (He's been working on a movie-review book, on and off, for a few years.) "But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I'm a better writer than most of the people writing about me. And I can write film criticism better than most of the people writing about me.

"Look," Tarantino says, "if you're a nice-guy artist, all you have to worry about is becoming boring at some point. But I'm not a nice-guy artist. When my movies come out, they draw a line in the sand."

Back in January, Tarantino was at Studio Babelsberg, eighteen or so glum gray miles outside Berlin. He was in his element. Shooting on the soundstage where Fritz Lang made Metropolis, where Josef von Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and where Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels played movie mogul after the Nazis took over—which is funny, because Goebbels's quest to be the David O. Selznick of the Third Reich is a major plot point in Basterds. Tarantino was grooving on the meta-movieness of it all. He was racing, too—come hell or high water, they were going to have this movie done in time for Cannes. But he was in a good mood. "Compared to Kill Bill, this is a spa," he said, grinning. "It's a facial. A salt rub. A Thai massage!"

He was on an elaborate movie-theater set, under opera bos draped with Nazi flags. The theater was full of German extras, done up for the premiere of a fictional Goebbels movie called Nation's Pride—silk gowns, opera gloves, S.S. dress uniforms.

Quentin fed them their motivation. "You guys are filled with the pride of a victorious Reich at this moment," he said, and then an AD relayed this to them in German.

Eli Roth, horror-movie auteur and Tarantino confrere, shot the Nation's Pride footage we see in Basterds. Roth was in Germany anyway; he plays Donny Donowitz, a bat-wielding soldier known to terrified Germans as "the Bear Jew." He was on-set today, in a tux and white gloves, ready to mingle with the crème de la crème of Nazi society."Quentin got the Jewish director to do the Nazi propaganda film," he says, grinning. "I thought I'd never do anything more disgusting than Hostel II!"

Quentin took a break around ten thirty that night. We sat next to each other in the back of his fake movie house, talked about the script. He was supposedly working on it, or not working on it, during the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Myths accrued. It was a 600-page screenplay. It was his magnum opus. He wanted Stallone and Willis and Eddie Murphy for the leads. He wanted Tim Roth and Michael Madsen. He wanted Adam Sandler. He was staying up all night, smoking more dope than Widespread Panic's road crew and watching D-grade flicks Joe Bob Briggs wouldn't use to prop up a wobbly table. He'd become a pure pop-cultural swamp thing, freed by success to sleep and root in the primordial muck that birthed him. In Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind's 2004 book about the House of Weinstein and the rocky interfaith marriage between art-house and multiplex that Tarantino's success helped Bob and Harvey engineer, Tarantino is last glimpsed circa 2000, "lost in his labyrinthine World War II script."

Quentin told me that all that fog-of-war-movie stuff was exaggerated. He wasn't lost. He just couldn't stop writing. He'd produced more story than a movie could hold. He thought about turning it into a novel. He came close to writing it up as a twelve-episode mini-series—his own gonzo Band of Brothers. He says director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) talked him out of that. "You're one of the only guys whose movies make me want to go out to a theater," Besson told him one night over drinks. This stuck with Quentin. In January 2008, he took one more shot at chopping his monster down to movie size.

He cut one major plotline—a story about a group of AWOL black soldiers making their way across occupied France, which he might turn into a Basterds sequel if this one does well. He focused in on the Basterds, a unit of Jewish American commandos using terrorist tactics against the Third Reich, and Shosanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who flees to Paris and becomes the proprietress of a movie house after the Nazis murder her family. He wrote a new third act, bringing these two stories together, to bloody and historically inaccurate effect, at the gala premiere of ein film von Joseph Goebbels. He'd write all day; at night he'd listen to records or float in his pool, ruminating. He feels that the movie was really written between January and July of last year. "I've never written such a big thing so fast before," he says. "It just came tumbling out of me."

He finished the script on July 2 and sent it to his longtime producing partner, Lawrence Bender, the next day, telling him he wanted to shoot it in time for Cannes. "I was like, Wow—really? You finished it? Shit!' " Bender says. "That was a wild moment." Tarantino flew to France to persuade Brad Pitt to play Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds. ("We talked about movies into the wee hours of the night," Pitt told reporters in May. "When I got up the next morning, I saw five empty bottles of wine lying on the floor—five!—and something that resembled a smoking apparatus.… And apparently I'd agreed to do the movie." When I ask Tarantino who supplied this apparatus, he says, "That was Brad. He did the fabrication. He can take a Coke can and make it—functional.")

When I ask Harvey Weinstein why Tarantino decided to make the movie on this scramble-the-fighters timetable, he brings up Grindhouse, the double-feature slasher-film tribute Tarantino co-directed with Robert Rodriguez in 2007. Weinstein doesn't believe that Grindhouse's poor box-office performance had anything to do with Quentin's decision to get moving on Basterds but believes Tarantino "wanted to get back in the saddle. He did his B movie, and I think it was time for him to go back and make his Quentin Tarantino movie."

Tarantino has a simpler explanation.

"I just like Cannes," Tarantino told me. "It's like the whole planet is checking your movie out—boom!—at one time, and—bam!—it either works or it doesn't. And especially when I'm there—it's the closest thing to Muhammad Ali having a championship fight. It's just—bam! You're throwing it down."

Tarantino became the Cassius Clay of the Croisette back in 1994, when Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. Clint Eastwood read the good news. He'd gone to France as a Sundance wunderkind; he came back as the biggest auteur-celebrity since Orson Welles.

They still love him in France. When he hits Cannes—boom!—in May, with Basterds, autograph hounds waving Tarantino posters in protective plastic sheeting jockey for position at the barricades with tudoed paparazzi. On the red carpet, he boogies to Dick Dale's "Misirlou," the opening-credits song from Pulp Fiction. He grabs Mélanie Laurent, who plays Shosanna in Basterds. She's all in white, he's all in black. They cut that red rug. They do the swim. They do the sailor's hornpipe. They do the twist, just like John Travolta and Uma Thurman. Quentin air-guitars down the red carpet—ten feet, twenty feet—and back up. It goes over huge. Everybody screams louder a couple of minutes later when Brad rolls up with Angelina. But next to Quentin's display of irrational exuberance, Brad and Angelina look like a couple of s.

The movie plays. When it's over, Tarantino gets a standing ovation. It lasts eleven minutes. A cameraman finds Quentin in the crowd, puts his face up on that big Palais des Festivals screen. He's hugging Mélanie. He's holding Brad's fist in the air, like the ref in a prizefight. He's smiling a cryptic smile.

"I felt like that ovation was a review," Harvey Weinstein tells me later, when I ask him about the post-Cannes reviews. "I think they would have stayed and cheered longer."Weinstein also denies that Quentin's been asked to trim the movie.

"Those stories are all untrue. There's no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don't even write that, it's insanity. There's not even a question of that. Whatever you're reading, it's like some insane blogger. He's not gonna cut. What he's doing is just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie [for Cannes]; most guys take six months. Most guys take a year. When I worked with Martin [Scorsese], we'd do eighteen months in postproduction. Quentin Tarantino cuts a movie in six weeks? Come on! There's shit on that cutting-room floor that'll blow your brains out. I was telling Quentin the opposite—You should put that shit back in the movie'—'cause it's un-fucking-believably great."

After the Cannes screening, there's a party, down on the beach. Big party tent, French ingenues lighting cigarettes off tiki torches, a DJ—flown in, somebody tells me, from "one of the hottest clubs in St-Tropez"—spiking his set with QT soundtrack cuts like "Son of a Preacher Man." Brad and Angelina float by; I try to stand within range of Angelina's healing radiance, in case I have an undiagnosed case of leprosy that needs curing.

Tarantino sips Heinekens. He talks to ladies—first to ladies he knows, then to ladies who look like they want to know him because he's Quentin Tarantino. After about an hour, he opens the velvet rope around his banquette. A security guy clears a path for him through the crowd. He makes his way out of the tent. Shakes a few hands en route. Disappears ninja-like through the black curtain separating the party from the rest of the beach. The DJ plays Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell," the twist song from Pulp Fiction, but he's not there to hear it.

Later, I ask Tarantino what he was thinking that night as the applause went on and on. "I wanted to get the biggest standing ovation of the festival, and I got it," he says. "They counted it. But I wanted to be inscrutable. That was my cool moment, and I was gonna be cool. Sometimes it's your time to be Elvis, and that was my time."

life gives you only so many Elvis moments, and Tarantino's had a few. Real triumphs—the kind that involve The Man with No Name presenting you with some hardware at a film festival just a few short years after you quit your dead-end job at the video store to make movies or die trying, yeah, but also the artistic kind. Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, sure. But watch both the Kill Bill movies back-to-back and tell me they don't add up to another Pulp-grade masterpiece—Tarantino not just synthesizing but trumping his influences, in a movie that happens to be about getting revenge on your mentor

If it's harder now to see him as a game changer, it's partly because he's made maybe a little too much of his cool moments over the years, saying yes to judging American Idol, acting on Broadway, and playing himself in a Wizard of Oz adaptation starring the Muppets. But it's also because of how thoroughly he's changed the game. He's partially responsible for hollow, hyperstylized post-Pulp crime movies from Romeo Is Bleeding all the way up to Smokin' Aces. But some of the best movies of the past two decades feel deeply post-Quentin, too, from the deadpan brutality of Fight Club to the pop-referential ball-breaking of the Apatow gang. The nonlinear storytelling of Pulp Fiction filters down through Memento all the way to How I Met Your Mother. The mainstreaming of QT's trashatarian taste made your local art house—where classy Brit fluff like Enchanted April used to rule—safe for unabashed exploitation flicks from foreign lands, like Korea's Oldboy and Sweden's Let the Right One In.

He can't light a fire under modern cinema every time, though. Basterds lacks the Swiss-watch craftsmanship of Pulp Fiction. It feels like Tarantino skimmed his behemoth of a rough draft and hammered together whatever worked, sometimes at the expense of clarity. That said, much of what he kept ranks with the best stuff he's produced in all his years of wonderfulness. A tense twenty-five-minute bar scene that unfolds like a one-act play; a montage of Laurent getting dressed to kill, set to David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)," that out-DePalmas Brian DePalma; the performances of Laurent and Christoph Waltz, who won best actor at Cannes for his turn as the affably despicable Nazi commandant Hans Landa.

The minute we see Laurent's character passing an afternoon in a café with a cigarette, a glass of vin rouge, and a paperback of Leslie Charteris's The Saint in New York, we get it—she's a QT dream girl, and the movie is his dream. It's a big, sprawling period piece in a time-honored, respectable genre, but he's completely uninterested in demonstrating that he can play by that genre's rules. All that classical war-movie stuff—the big-battle set piece, the ragtag crew storming the castle with knives between their teeth—takes a backseat to Quentin's own obsessions. Language. Restaurants. Women's feet. Other people's movies—pre-World War II German cinema, spaghetti Westerns, Heaven's Gate—and the moviegoing experience itself. Even the soundtrack is all borrowed score—a little Elmer Bernstein, a lot of Morricone, even a Billy Preston cut from the 1972 Jim Brown vehicle Slaughter.

"I've had people write that I've seen too many movies," he's saying at the Hamlet, sometime around mint julep number three. "In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?"

Another common knock on Tarantino: He set out in a more mature, meditative direction with Jackie Brown, then wimped out, opting for flashy pastiche over human-scale drama. He begs—big surprise—to differ.

"I didn't go in that direction," he says. "I arrived at my destination with Jackie Brown. I did it! I don't have to prove that I can do it again. I can do it again if I wanna do it again, but even if I go off and do Friday the 13th part nine, that doesn't change Jackie Brown. That's still a mature piece of work. Made when I wasn't even that mature."

That's the weird part—you made your getting-older movie when you were only 34. (He's 46 now.)

"Yeah. And it's as much of an old-man movie as I ever wanna make."

He's said this sort of thing before. That he has no desire to be a "geriatric" filmmaker.

"You can lie about a lot of things," he says, "but your filmography doesn't lie. It's right there. And it doesn't give a shit about why you did it. It doesn't give a shit about what was happening that year in your life, or that gal you were married to. Ten years after the fact, your movies are all created fuckin' equal. And if you go through their filmographies, directors don't get better. Especially when they've had a serious twenty- or thirty-year career. It's not like they're waiting for their last five years to make that out-and-out masterpiece. They get worse."

(I ask him to expand. I say he doesn't have to mention names. He says he wasn't going to. You can probably fill them in yourself: Francis Ford Coppola, puttering about the vineyards of diminished expectation. Eastwood, endlessly rephrasing what Unforgiven had to say about Dirty Harry types in the winter of their badassedness. Scorsese, maybe, though it would probably hurt Tarantino to say that out loud.)

"I imagine this is partly just what happens to you when you're in your sixties," he says. "And for other filmmakers, well, maybe that's fine. But if you're a rock 'n' roll artist, and then at some point you start singing big-band tunes—you can do it, and you can be really happy, but there's a difference in your career.

"People change," he says, setting his mint julep down next to his water glass.

"There's the rock 'n' roll time"—he points at the drink—"and there's the big-band time," he says, pointing at the water. "I don't want that. Where I'm coming from, I'm thinking about when I'm dead and gone, and some kid—who's maybe not even born yet—sees one of my movies and digs it. And he says, This guy's fucking got it going on. I want to see something else by this guy.' But he doesn't know who the fuck I am, so he doesn't know to go to Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. He's just gonna pick the easiest one he can get his hands on. And if that's one of the ones I make during my old-man years—well, I've lost him right then and there."

It's like when you're in high school, I say, and you decide you're going to check out Bob Dylan, but because you don't know any better, you end up buying one of the weird Christian records. Or Knocked Out Loaded. You're saying you don't ever want to make your Knocked Out Loaded.

"Yeah," Tarantino says. (Then he says "Yeah" about eighteen more times.) "Even though I do really love the Sam Shepard song on Knocked Out Loaded. That's an epic song—Brownsville Girl.' But that's what I mean. People are gonna be rummaging in the grab bag of Quentin Tarantino's work, and I want it all to be fucking kick-ass. I want the first film to be as strong as the last film. I want that kid to get his little dick hard about every single one of 'em."

A lot of the directors you're alluding to, I point out, would probably say they're doing the best work of their careers.

"They might very well think that." Tarantino says. "And that's why I don't want to be making movies at that point.

"There are directors," Tarantino says, "who don't know how to stop working. Maybe they thought of themselves as artists at one time, but now they're just directors, and they're going out and getting a job. And they live beyond their fuckin' means, anyway, so they can't stop working."

I imagine that kicks in for a lot of people, I say. Even if you don't live beyond your means—at some point, if you've got a wife and kids and a mortgage, that has to affect the choices you make.

"That's living beyond your means!" Tarantino says, laughing. "When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kid's private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry. It's their job. It's not my job. It's my calling."

He says he's going to hang up his megaphone when he's 60. He'll write books, maybe judge a few film festivals. Grace the occasional Tarantino retrospective with his presence. "I'll be the grand old man," he says. "Like what Sam Fuller did the last twenty years of his life. That looked pretty groovy to me. And when I'm sitting there in my retrospective, I don't want to have to watch the movie I made to pay for my pool."

I ask if that's why he takes so much time off—if he's trying to conserve that young-director energy.

"Let me answer this in a few different ways," he says, then stops. "Actually, give me a second—I'm gonna run to the restroom."

When he comes back he's winded, as if the restroom he ran to was a few blocks away.

"Here's the thing," he says. "When I'm doing a movie, I'm not doing anything else. It's all about the movie. I don't have a wife. I don't have a kid. Nothing can get in my way. The whole fucking world can go to hell and burst into flames. I don't care. This is my life. It's Mount Everest. If you're climbing Mount Everest, you're not doing anything else. All your concerns, all the mundane things, family, any of that, it just—pfft—disappears. Goes away. It's mist. It's just nothing but the mountain, every single solitary day. I'm not saying that I'll never get married or have a kid before I'm 60. But I've made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time. This is my time to make movies."

He grabs my napkin off the seat, uses it to mop his brow. He says there was a moment, a couple of years ago. A relationship, one that might have led to marriage. "But if that had happened," he says, "I wouldn't have made Inglourious Basterds. Or I might have eventually, but I wouldn't have made it with the same intensity. And it wouldn't be finished now. Some people will like Inglourious Basterds. Some people won't. But it was made with all the passion I've made everything with—except maybe my first film, which was probably made with more passion than I'll ever have again. I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing." He taps out punctuation on the table. "I'm right where I need to be."*

it's like he's giving us the speech Ving Rhames gives Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, when he tells Bruce to throw the fight: "This business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does."

And he's not wrong. Maybe a little presumptuous, a little too positive that there'll be Tarantino retrospectives by the time he enters the Lifetime Achievement age bracket, but not wrong. Still, it's a little weird that—at 46!—he can't see any middle ground between forswearing all worldly attachments in the name of art and making movies to pay for your pool. That he doesn't perceive any upside, for an artist, of spending time outside worlds of your own making.

The thing about hanging out in those worlds, of course, is that you get to be God. Which means you get weird. Which is maybe why the night ends the way it does. Here's what happens. We talk a little longer, and then the waitress comes over. Not the one who took our orders before. A new girl. Asian. She asks if we want another drink. Quentin says he's up for one more, then asks what time it is. It's ten thirty-five. He takes this news badly.

"You were supposed to let me know that it was nine," he says. "That was why you were bringing the check over!"

The waitress doesn't know what to say. She's suddenly being directed by Quentin Tarantino, and he has some issues with her performance.

"I asked if you wanted anything else," the waitress says, "and—"

"That's just what a normal waitress does," Quentin says. "You were supposed to come over and say, Here's your check,' because that was my cue, to know when it was time to go. You did it just like a normal person would do it." He laughs. It's like I'm sitting here with Mr. Pink all of a sudden. Or like all the stress of the night—talking about the movie, defending himself, maybe the whole sad David Carradine thing, too—is coming out. The waitress apologizes again.

There was an arrangement, it seems. We were supposed to talk for two hours and then the waitress was supposed to bring the check at nine, as a signal, so Tarantino knew when to excuse himself. The subterfuge makes no sense. It's the kind of plan only a guy who's seen too many movies would make. The waitress looks flustered. The waitress looks humiliated.

The waitress says, "My apologies. So you don't want another round?"

"No," Quentin says. "We're gonna take off. I have to—yeah," he says. "I gotta take off."

I ask if we can talk again. He says yeah—yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah—we can grab another hour on the phone. Absolutely. (A few days later, his publicist calls to walk back this promise. We never talk again.) He grabs bad motherfucker, gets up, and leaves. He practically leaves a Quentin-shaped hole in the wall, he's out of there so fast. Maybe he drops by the Roxy, checks out Lay Lay's band. Who knows. I sign the check, overtip guiltily. Waitressing is the number-one occupation for female non–college graduates in this country. I think I heard somebody say that in a movie once.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.